Monday, July 14, 2014

How to be Creative, also Blobbins

Or at least, this is how I think I think creatively. Your mileage may vary.

1

Keep a slush pile. This is where you
put all of your incomplete ideas, or ideas that don't quite meet your criteria for quality control. Odds are good that you have tons of ideas
that are aaaaalmost good enough. Sometimes you can frankenstein
two sorta-good ideas into a brilliant mongrel. Sometimes you can
read over an old idea and think of a way to improve it.

And don't just ignore your slush pile until you've run 100% dry of ideas. Refer back to it often, maybe before you start thinking of anything at all.

Your slush pile can be a file on a
computer or a small notebook. Maybe you're watching a movie and the
people on screen realize that the stillborn calf is pregnant with
something that is not a cow
and you're like, “That's a fucked up idea and I like it”, then
that goes into your notebook. It is the fertile, messy mulch beneath
the shrubbery of your brain.

Ex: “blue goblins” + “boneless
and they live in jars” = “boneless blue goblins that live in
urns”

2

Use your ideas. If you use your blue,
boneless goblins in a module, I guarantee you'll have some more ideas
about the goblins while you are roleplaying one, or after a player
asks you what's in the goblin's pockets.

Basically, you are just asking yourself "What are the implications of what I have just written? What does this stuff imply?"

This works for writing, too. Expanding
a small idea into a paragraph will usually involve answering some
more questions that crop up. How do these boneless urn-goblins feel
about their urns? How do they feel about skeletons, especially given that they don't
have any? If you can't turn a boneless goblin into a skeletonized
undead, is there a different kind of undead that you can
turn them into?

Of
course, if you ever find yourself writing boring facts (the average
blue goblin burrow contains 20-400 individuals, who are ruled by a
chieftain of level 3, blah blah blah) then you must STOP IMMEDIATELY.
That sort of square noise takes 3 seconds to invent at the table, and 3 seconds to invent at the computer. There is no need to predecide how big the average blue goblin burrow is when you can decide it during a session just as readily.

3

Don't let "creativity" just be something that you do when you sit down to fill out the rest of your 50-room dungeon. Constantly revisit your old ideas when you are
taking a shower, taking a shit, taking a break at work, trying avoid
premature ejaculation, etc. These
events will give your brain a richer and more varied texture, which
will inform your ideas. Like, when you're taking a shit, your brain
will wrinkle up more because it smells bad. This will make you
approach the whole boneless blue goblin conundrum from a different
angle than if, say, you were frolicking with some baby deer and
thinking about boneless blue goblins.

Plus,
if you're sculpting an idea while you are driving, walking, jogging
somewhere, you'll be constantly receiving a procession of images and
places. I was driving down Highway 5 and drove past Harris Ranch (like, billions of cows) and the smell alone gave me ideas. Or maybe the methane was just getting to my brain.When you see an interesting post on the internet, you must ask yourself "yes, but is it gamable?" When you are chillaxing with your bros, and one of your bros tells a cool story you must also ask yourself "yes, but is it gamable?" When your crazy uncle sends you an email about how contrails are turning all the Mexicans into lizards, you must ask yourself "yes, but is it gamable?"

BUT
also pay attention to why you like the thing in the first place,
because that's the element you want to steal, not necessarily the
whole enchilada. Like, when the severed wolf's head bites the giant
boar, why is that so cool? Is it because it's a head? Is it because
its a wolf? Is it because it was a dead body part that just attacked
someone? Figure out which part of the DNA contains the awesome, and
then just steal that part. It'll make it easier to recombine with
the rest of your slush pile.(Although I have bunches of inspiring pictures on my computer, I don't consider them part of my slush pile. I try to extract the part of the picture's DNA that I really like, and add that to the slush pile. And also, I find a bunch of brief word-concepts easier to parse than a folder with a thousand images in it. "one eyeball shared between both sockets", "strength proportionate to colorfulness", "hot chick with huge, grafted muscle-arms", etc.)

Like,
a lot of the city encounters in Vornheim are powerful good because
they force players to deal with something. You could just take the
kernel (the "how is this forcing a PC to deal with it?") at the center of a Vornheim entry and flesh it out yourself. “persistent entertainers demand PCs join
their cause” becomes "snake charmer guild demands that PCs assist in reclaiming/repairing the giant snake sanctuary in Central Park".

5

Stealing
names can be fun. Figure out what part of the name you like the
most. Is it the vowels/assonance? The consonants/alliteration? Can
you transform the consonants into something similar? K=G. T=D.
S=Z. P=B=V. L=R. M=N. J=CH. 'crocodile' = 'grogotyr' =
'gorgodile'. 'jerusalem' = 'cheluzaren'.

6

Turn
normal animals into unlikely chimeras. This is how you shed tropes.My favorite way to make a chimera by giving one animal the biology or lifestyle of another. Like what if there were some wolves that were 100% marine and never left the water? What would a giant land-dwelling starfish eat? What if there were people that lived like ants?

The
laziest kind of chimera is just to remix body shapes. Sure, if you
combine a bird with a horse you get a pegasus, and that was the pinnacle of creativity 1000 years ago. If you mix an octopus and a dog you get an octodog, and I
suppose that's sort of creative, too. The laziest of this lazy method is
just to make it an intelligent humanoid. Jellfish people.
Kangaroo-folk. Giraffo-morphs. Even that can sort of open up interesting avenues of thought.(There's nothing wrong with lazy creativity like this, but if you are going to invent some kangaroo-folk, don't just stop there. You can't smash kangaroo and Australian stereotypes together and expect to transport your players to a fantastic realm of fantasy. If you include only the things that come easily to mind when you cross kangaroos and Australians, then your kangaroo-folk have no more surprises for your players, beyond the initial concept of kangaroo-people. Which means you need to add more. This is why cat-people almost always suck. People just apply cat stereotypes (playful, curious, fierce, hunters) to a race of humanoids and call it a day. So if you want to make cat-people that aren't boring, you need to add something else to the mix. Columbian catnip druglords. Ruled by black cat bad-luck warlocks and a storm giant witch. Ecology of cuckoos. Worshippers of Nyarlathotep but also of themselves. Masters of engineering and fire magic. Literally, anything but just cat tropes. Please.)

7

Inversions
are fun. You can invert tropes. Write an adventure about saving a
dragon from a princess. Write about a type of fey that gives people
babies instead of stealing them. Write about dwarves that hate gold.
At the very least, these will get you asking questions. What's up
with these dwarves? How'd they get this way?

Or
just ask yourself open ended questions. What's the opposite of a
dragon? What's the opposite of a bar mitzvah? What's the opposite of sex?

Reskins
are fun. Reskin Lincoln assassination or the plot of Master of the
Flying Guillotine. The ninja turtles are now barbarian berserkers
who want you to help them fight a ninja and his demon rat. Remix and rearrange. Your slush pile can help you with this.

Change
scope. Tsunamis make sense, but why would a small pond suddenly
smash the canoes and flood the town? (Big phenomenon → small.)
People get pregnant all the time, but why would every woman in town
suddenly get pregnant at exactly the same time? (Local phenomenon →
regional.)

8

When
you're writing stuff down, keep it fluid for as long as you can.
Sometimes you'll write a story and you don't know what it's about
until you finish it. Sometimes you'll write a dungeon and not
realize what the treasure is at the center until you finish it—the
it's obvious. Write all the interesting things down first, and then fill in all the logical considerations later.(If you write down so much cool stuff that there's no way to mesh it all together into a coherent adventure/dungeon, that's okay. Just remove a few conflicting parts and put them back into your slush pile. You'll use them later, and they'll be just as awesome then, too.)

Before
you draw a single room in your dungeon, figure out what the theme is
and then write down all of the Coolest Things Possible involving that
theme. Like if your theme is “cloud castle that imprisons powerful
dwarven geomancers”, sit down and brainstorm the coolest possible
rooms in that dungeon. A room where terramantic criminals are forced
to levitate in the center of their cells, while their jailors drag
them around like balloons. Air elemental guards living inside a
giant bagpipe that also doubles as the alarm system. Gaseous,
floating rust monsters trained to sniff out metals and stones,
because terramantic dwarven criminals can pull a Magneto. Dragnets
used to harvest water out of clouds, like a trawler.

By the
time you finish your idea list, you might also realize that there is
also a flumph masterminding the whole thing. Or that this is actually
a jail for fire elementalist
elves as well, because you've been watching to much Last Airbender. And because you've kept your outline as fluid as possible, you don't have to redraw your map or rewrite the motivations for the warden. (Full-detail maps and necessary-but-mundane NPCs are good examples of things that you should do late in the process.)

THEN
you draw out your dungeon. THEN you flesh out all the extra rooms so
that the things is complete.9Creativity is a muscle. There's only so much you can do in a day. If you are frustrated, or you absolutely can't come up with anything, or you've already read through your slush pile twice and can't come up with anything--STEP AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER and go do something else. You can't force it.Also, there are going to be days when your brain is going to be dry. That's okay; don't sweat it. Spend the time organizing your slush pile or go read some interesting stuff elsewhere.

JOESKY
TAX: BLOBBINS

Blobbins
are blue, boneless goblins. Each goblin lives in an urn, each
exactly the size of the blobbin. They make their urns out of clay
and fingernails. Parents make their baby's first urn, and then they
trade up as they grow, like hermit crabs. Urns are never re-used,
but are instead filled with fingernail clippings and lost teeth and
then used in construction. They do this because a blobbin considers their urn to
be part of their body, and crawling inside another blobbin's urn is
akin to crawling inside their skin. When a blobbin dies, the body is
discarded like trash (fed to cave pigs) while the urn is revered.

Blobbin
graveyards are just caves filled with urns. For reasons not
understood, nearly every blobbin goes on to become a pale blue ghost
that resides inside their urn. Blobbin urns are sometimes filled
with some amount of treasure that they valued in life, but blobbins
make for vengeful ghosts. The trick to robbing blobbin urn-graves is
to get the blobbin to blame someone else. The traditional method is
to throw a weasel into the urn, and then replace any gold coins with
an equal number of copper ones. By the time the blobbin ghost has
finished shriveling the weasel, the tomb robbers are gone and the
blobbin ghost is none the wiser, since they cannot tell copper from
gold (at least, their ghosts cannot).

Blobbin
urns also make handy weapons if thrown, since they tend to blame the
nearest creature, and blobbin ghosts are furious if their urn is
smashed.

When they run, it looks like a deflated tire rolling down a hill.

Blobbins
revere a god called the Great Blue Smoke Monster. Blobbin clerics
are easy to spot. They carry a gigantic urn on their back, painting
with blue and black triangles. Inside each of these urns is a Blue
Smoke Monster which obeys the cleric and is regarded as a divine
manifestation of the true Great Blue Smoke Monster.

Blobbins
fear skeletons. Even smiling at them will cause them to recoil in
disgust from visible teeth, and even the bravest blobbins warriors
will flee from an animated skeleton.

Although
blobbins cannot be made into undead skeletons, they are sometime
animated into highly malleable zombies. Able to squish under doors
and hide themselves under saddles, blobbin zombies are feared as
assassins. They prefer to strangle their prey. Necromancers are
also sometimes fond of stuffing them into chests, in order to guard
treasure. Additionally, Blobbin zombies can also cushion fragile
materials in a chest, protecting it from bumps and bangs.

Blobbins
are hunted for the rich blue dye that can be harvested from their
gallbladders. It is a deep, rich blue, and is very popular.
However, the price ensures that only the aristocracy will be able to
afford silk dyed Blobbin Blue.

Unlike
their green-skinned relatives, blobbins are very clean. They
frequently wear armor made from cave tortoises or giant snails. By
using their elasticity of their heads, they are able to throw spears
with great accuracy and power. They favorite weapon is a
short-hafted trident (very effective against the squishy bodies of
fellow blobbins). Their favorite forms of recreation are
spear-chucking, moshing, and naknak
(sort of like spoken word poetry but with lots of sound effects).
They are sometimes accompanied by clay golems shaped to look like
small rhinos, painted blue with white triangles. Blobbins are
sometimes valued as mercenaries because of their usefulness in
breaking sieges (they can survive being launched by catapult).

Stats
as goblins, except that they don't take any damage from bludgeoning.
Also, they value their urn as highly as their life, and so they are
quite easy to blackmail/bully once a PC has their urn.